You can read the whole story at Jim Franklin’s place of how the late and lamented David Stove held a contest for the Worst Argument In The World.
In [Stove’s] marking scheme, half the marks went to the degree of badness of the argument, half to the degree of its endorsement by philosophers. Thus an argument was sought that was both very bad, and very prevalent.
Here is the Winner:
We can know things only
as they are related to us
[or] under our forms of perception and understanding
[or] insofar as they fall under our conceptual schemes,
etc.
So,
we cannot know things as they are in themselves.
Famous philosophers and academics do make this argument. Which is to say, they speak it. But nobody believes it. Everybody who uses it in everyday real life, in their interactions with the world, and particularly with the academic bureaus in charge of parking and paychecks at universities, reject the argument with gusto.
But they will say it, if only to sound mysterious.
Here’s a recent example from physicist David Deutsch. The quotation comes from a tweet, at which is a two minute video of Deutsch.
The eye only detects light, which we don’t perceive. Brains only detect nerve impulses, and they don’t perceive even those as what they really are, namely electrical crackles. So we perceive nothing as what it really is. Our connection to reality is never just perception; it’s always, as Karl Popper put it, “Theory Laden.” Scientific knowledge isn’t derived from anything; it’s like all knowledge; it’s conjectural, guesswork, tested by observation, not derived from it.
We will another day examine a paper in which Deutsch tries to out-Popper Popper, but today we’ll stick with this example of the Worst Argument. It’s obvious that we can swap in his minor premise “as they are given to us by electrical crackles” and it fits the Worst Argument schema to perfection.
Ed Feser saw it and responded that Deutsch’s effort was
About as good an argument as: “I can’t see the eye chart without my glasses; therefore, all I ever really see are my glasses, and never the eye chart itself!” One of modern philosophy’s zombie sophistries, which refuses to stay dead no matter how many times it’s refuted.
Franklin quipped, about earlier attempts, that the Worst Argument can be summarized “In Alan Olding’s telling caricature, ‘We have eyes, therefore we cannot see.'”
What Deustch should have concluded, it being obvious that he perceived the piece of paper on which he had written his speech as a piece of paper on which was his speech, is that electrical sparkles, or whatever, are therefore insufficient as explanations. Something more is needed than neurons firing to explain perception. He should have seen that materialistic explanations, at the very least of the kind he had in mind, weren’t enough.
It’s more amusing when you consider he was trying to convince an audience that what they, the audience, were perceiving could not be known as perception is in itself. “Ah,” some of them might have said, convinced by his authority, “I finally understand why I cannot understand!”
You might have recognized the trope, common with those who attempt arguments against free will. As I often say, it always boils down to this: “We could make better decisions if we realized we cannot make decisions.”
Stove generated an example leaning on Berkeley’s Idealism (quoted from Franklin): “[Y]ou cannot have trees-without-the mind in mind, without having them in mind. Therefore, you cannot have trees-without-the-mind in mind.”
This argument, which Stove called `the Gem’, is a version of the `Worst Argument’ because it argues from the fact that we can know physical things only under our own mental forms to the impossibility of knowing physical things at all. Stove finds this argument in many later idealists. Fascinating as High Victorian idealism is, its hold over modern thought is not what it was, so let us leave that topic aside — except to mention Stove’s complaints about the extra pomposity added to the argument as each successive stage: `Thus you never say, for example, “things as they are,” and still less, “things”. You say “things as they are in themselves,” or better still, “things and their properties as they exist both in and for themselves.”’ Then you can construct a seriously heavyweight argument, like:
We can eat oysters only insofar as they are brought under the physiological and chemical conditions which are the presuppositions of the possibility of being eaten.
Therefore,
We cannot eat oysters as they are in themselves…
Stove thought the prevalence of the Gem arose from cultural relativism:
The cultural-relativist, for example, inveighs bitterly against our science-based, white-male cultural perspective. She says that it is not only injurious but cognitively limiting. Injurious it may be; or again it may not. But why does she believe that it is cognitively limiting? Why, for no other reason in the world, except this one: that it is ours. Everyone really understands, too, that this is the only reason. But since this reason is also generally accepted as a sufficient one, no other is felt to be needed. (Stove, 1991, 167)
This attitude surely accounts for many Gems, but not, I think, for Deustch’s version. With him, and with a great multitude of scientists, it is the love of theory that creates the Gem.
In Deustch’s theory, all there is are crackles, and the particles and fields that generate them. The Gem follows directly. This is why Gem speakers usually end up saying things like “Perception and free will are an illusion”, but they never get around to defining who is having this curious illusion.
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“Perception and free will are an illusion”, but they never get around to defining who is having this curious illusion."
Lol. Of course not. They're being deceived of course.
At a certain point believing that we have "perception & free will" is an act of Faith. It's evident that those who deny free will always not believe in God. Think it was Padre Pio who said of those who don't believe in (heaven &) hell, "they'll believe it when they get there".
But when you burp up The Worst Argument In The World with a toney British accent, all the "experts" nod in agreement, making the non-"experts" in the room look at each other and say, "Wow, that makes a lot of sense."